


transcendent, ephemeral

by annuska



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Video Games), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: (just enough to earn an M rating), Character Study, Gen, Implied Neglect, PTSD, Trauma, deep shadow the hedgehog lore, episodic, obvious spoilers for like every game in the series, violence (non-explicit)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2020-12-13 22:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21005471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annuska/pseuds/annuska
Summary: Chronicles of an experiment, a martyr, a revenant.Shadow the Hedgehog character study. Tags will be added as story is updated.** This work will feature themes of trauma, PTSD, mental illness, psychosis, non-explicit violence, and implied neglect/abuse. Please keep this in mind if any of these topics are a trigger for you.





	1. propagation (I)

Time flows differently in space than it does on earth.

Time is valued differently when societal pressures become meaningless, and scientists possess instruments capable of slowing biological growth, or stopping it all together.

Time accelerates and decelerates rapidly when you track it in accordance with a little girl’s symptoms that accelerate and decelerate accordingly.

None of these things set a stable foundation for sentient experiments susceptible to memory loss.

The first memories he’ll lose are of his first conscious days, but the loss will rarely be linear from that point on.

There are feelings, sensations, sounds. Things he _knows_, though he has no recollection of the experience of them. A persistent floating, weightless and heavy all at once. The feelings and sensations and sounds become clearer, gradually, but are always muffled, swaddled in something he can’t place. He has no concept of himself, not yet, and it would be absurd to expect him to.

The sensations fade in and out, but time means nothing to him yet, and so they merely happen and lapse, and it would similarly be absurd to expect him to know how many days or months or years pass by.

Then comes awareness like he’s never known before.

He sits in a cold room on a cold floor. Wires and cables sprout from his limbs and flow from his head, and a feeling pricks at his nerve endings as a wire tangles in one of his quills and has to squint in the light. He doesn’t have a label for the feeling yet, but he has labels for the sights around him: walls, windows, tables; a chamber of fluid, to which some of the cables and wires run; people.

The people are not in the room with him; they stand behind one of the two windows, the only one he can see through. The other is tinted, and he begins to doubt his initial classification of the pane as a window.

He has an immediate yearning to be closer to the people, but he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs, how to move closer. He doesn’t know how to signal his desire, only able to flex his fingers. The feeling that’s been pricking at his nerve endings becomes larger, and soon overshadows the yearning, and builds inside of him, and that he has no idea what to do with the feeling that paradoxically feeds it. Heat begins to overwhelm the coldness of the room, and his fingers spark.

The humans on the other side of the window can hear the boom as the electricity surges and shorts out the power in the containment room. They make marks on their clipboards, shake their heads, begin to mumble that this attempt will be no better than the last. An elderly man leaves the group in a silent huff, and in his absence, the mumbling grows to gossiping. He should choose one or the other. She’ll die before the experiment is stable, let alone successful. The government is going to get wind of this. We’ll all be out of a job.

In the dark, the yearning overthrows the heat and pricking at his nerve endings, and settles into him like space dust.

There are more interludes of light that puncture the enveloping darkness. There’s a growing awareness.

His range of movement extends beyond his fingers, and he learns to stretch his limbs, tilt his head, pull himself across the floor, stand up, walk. The room stays cold. He wakes up with new knowledge, new words, new descriptors for things he’s never seen before with each interlude. The wires might as well be a part of him. He learns to control the feeling that pricks at his nerve endings and sparks at his fingertips and blasts through the room. The humans stay on the other side of the window.

And then, one interlude, he doesn’t return to the enveloping darkness. For the first time, he has both awareness and a sense of continuity, a vague sense of time. The humans come and go, and he doesn’t know what they’re doing on the other side of that window, and even when they aren’t there, he feels watched. His back quills shiver sometimes, and he turns to the tinted window, but is unable to see through it.

The light seems to last an eternity—if he had any idea what an eternity was.

The longer it lasts, the tighter his insides feel.

Even when the room dims, the light feels overwhelming—but a little less so.

He subconsciously searches for a pattern, but the change between light and dark is erratic, and fits uncomfortably into his growing awareness of time. If he had memories of life before space, if he’d been _aware_ at all back then, he’d know that the irregular rhythm was disruptive, unnatural. He’d be able to place the subconscious yearning for day and night, a reliable cycle, something to stabilize the unease that accompanied his growing awareness.

When the people and the wires and the cold and the sensations and the mechanical humming and the sudden definitions for words and things he’d never known before become too much—_entirely _too much, because the floor is so hard and presses against the wires attached to his quills, as if he were a marionette—he sleeps.

Never for long, though. Always because of that _light_.

He begins to miss the absolute darkness, if only so he could stop feeling so tired.

One day he wakes up with the knowledge that he’s in space.

Space doesn’t seem much different from where he already thought he might be: a lot of unknowns in the middle of a void.

But now he also knows about Earth, a planet lush with life and growth and _warmth_, and things that sound much more inviting than wires and et cetera, et cetera, the rest of it all. It’s enticing, though he’s never seen it or any of those inviting things, and thinking about it fills his chest with the same hollow pressure that staring back at the people on the other side of the window does.

He begins to realize there are gaps in the knowledge he wakes up with, things that he feels as if he should know but doesn’t. He grows curious. He paces the room, at first, only looking: the chamber of fluid, which he now knows sustains life; the wires, which attach to his quills from the ceiling; machines with lights that blink at varying rates, adorned by unlabeled buttons he can’t begin to fathom the use of.

The group of people on the other side of the window becomes smaller and smaller, and he grows bolder and bolder.

First, it’s a tentative tug on a wire. It doesn’t detach from his head or the ceiling, but sends an electric feeling into his forehead. He tries another one, which isn’t electrical, but clear and carrying some kind of fluid. He pinches the tube, and begins to feel dizzy. He lets go and the dizziness fades. He’s never woken up with the knowledge of _why_ he’s restrained by all these attachments, but he pieces together that maybe they’re recording something, or feeding him something, or maybe both.

Then, it’s a hand run along a steel tabletop. It’s cold to the touch, unsurprisingly. It’s a brush against the blinking lights. This time, he feels the smallest trace of heat, which does surprise him. He draws his hand away from the buttons and places his palm against the side of the machine. It’s even warmer. He runs to a machine on the other side of the room, and finds it similarly warm.

But everything else is so _cold_.

Finally, he approaches the window.

No one is there right now, but a light is on in the distance, drawing him closer despite the darkness of his own room and the one outside the window. Another light, closer now, but he can’t see anything else. He backs up a few feet for a better view, but there’s still nothing.

It’s coming from a room down the hall, he decides, and resolves to try again when the light in his own room returns.

Then comes the horrid scraping sound, only vaguely muffled by the wall between him and the room the people appear in. His fur seems to stand on end and a chill runs down his spine, and for the first time in his memory, he feels an instinct to activate the electricity at his fingertips, _purposely_.

The top one-third of a person’s face appears, barely able to see over the edge of the window. The instinct vanishes, and he feels drawn toward the person instead. This person isn’t like the others, though. This one is…

Smaller.

He steps forward without thinking, and the yearning is stronger than he’s ever felt before, as if his chest would burst if he was unable to open the window or door immediately and meet the smaller person. He loses sight as he draws closer, has a brief moment of frustrating realization, followed by a pause to cover his ears at the sound of the scraping again, and finally, he steps back.

The person is gone, and the lights are out.


	2. propagation (II)

There’s another gap in his memory now – but without any sights, sensations, or sounds.

Just a gap between _then_, in the room with the machines and chamber and wires, to _now_, in a place askew from all he had known.

Softness is a foreign quality, but it’s the first thing he feels as his eyes open. He’s laying down, but unlike the cold, hard floor of The Room, the surface beneath him is warm in comparison, forgiving in how it cushions his quills.

The next thing he feels is lightness, a weight lifted off of him, and it’s disorienting. He lifts a hand to scratch at his head, where it feels off, but for the first time, it doesn’t become tangled in wires and tubes. His eyes travel toward the ceiling, and there’s a circular plate like the one in The Room, but no wires extend from it, and he realizes that nothing is attached to his head anymore.

He sits up, slowly, cautious of the lightness and how the missing weight affects his movements. It’s difficult to adjust, but he manages it somehow. He looks down at the soft surface below him, and a single word pops into his head—_bed_—followed by _blanket_ and _pillow_. His feet slide off the edge of the bed, and dangle above the floor. His eyes follow the red stripes that run down his legs before lifting to survey the room.

A nightstand with a glass resting on the top. A small bookcase, underfilled. A single machine with no blinking lights. A table next to it, steel and square. Another window, but different somehow. Another door, but with a smaller door built into it.

The light here doesn’t feel as harsh.

So why do his insides still feel so constricted?

But more importantly: why is he here?

Here, the light doesn’t switch on and off constantly, and he gains an understanding of _night_ and _day_, relative as they are to his placement in space. Large groups of people don’t come to watch him through the window, approaching instead of quantities of one, or two, sometimes three. He begins to grow familiar with some of their faces. They never stay long.

He learns that the small door-in-the-door is for passing objects through, but only if _They _want to: he tries one day to open it from his side, but he can’t pull it open, and he doesn’t dare try to use his sparking fingers as much as he may want to. They pass trays of food and jugs of water through, and he quickly learns that he must deposit the empty trays and jugs back through the door when it opens again. He considers pushing a hand through, but uncertainty stops him.

And _that’s_ something new: thirst, hunger. He doesn’t like it.

He browses the titles on the bookshelf, and finds them all to be medical. He wonders why he knows so much about these things when the people never come closer than the window. He wonders why and how he knows any of the things he does. He wonders what happened the small person—the _child. _The _little girl._

Every word that pops into his mind out of nowhere, as if it were buried in the recesses of his mind just waiting to be activated, feels more exhausting than the last.

At least the tiredness isn’t new.

Sometimes he overhears the people on the other side of the door talking when the door-in-the-door is open, and he draws close to it, magnetized to the sound. He picks up words and phrases that don’t trigger any definitions in his head, and he desperately wishes for some way to figure out what they mean. One phrase in particular always sticks out to him:

Project Shadow.

He can surmise well enough that _Project_ is the title, and _Shadow_ is the descriptor, but it doesn’t lead him to a conclusion about what it might be. He wants to ask, but he isn’t sure that he has a voice. He’s never had reason to find out. And if They won’t come closer, won’t stand in the same room with him, only _observe _him, why would They speak to him?

Except one day, one of Them does.

“Here, Shadow.”

The tray and jug slide through the door and it closes on the outside, taking the voice with it. He feels a chill, but it doesn’t pass, instead growing from his spine to his arms and chest and extremities. He looks at his hands—the blueish-black, the stripe of red, the golden rings that mysteriously appeared after the _electricity incident_—and then up at the window.

_Project Shadow_.

Something about it troubles him.

He lays awake that night, staring at the ceiling and trying to piece all of the knowledge he’s accumulated together, tries to make sense of it, but there are too many missing variables, too many gaps. He can’t even begin to fathom what sort of _project_ he might be—or how literal that might be. He’d never even considered that he might have a name.

If it _could_ be considered a name.

Shadow thinks back on the unusual amount of medical knowledge he seems to be aware of—first aid and procedures and potential breakthroughs and terminology—and briefly considers that it may be a part of whatever sort of project he is, but he runs into that roadblock again: They won’t come near him.

Not even to open an actual door to give him food. They have to slide it through a smaller one. They have to look at him through a window.

He grits his teeth. Why won’t they just _interact_ with him? Why are they afraid? It’s been years since the electricity incident.

_Oh_.

Shadow sits up slowly, trying to parse the sudden grasp on the passing of time. Minutes were easy, hours less so, and days absolutely difficult, but _years_? He didn’t even know how many, but somehow, he knew it had been years.

He’d been alone in a cold room for _years_.

It wasn’t as if Shadow had ever known anything else, so it doesn’t seem rational that it would elicit such a strong response from his nervous system, right there, square in the chest, that it would intermingle with his blood and travel through his veins, touching every inch of his body with that same awful feeling that he can’t even name.

But here he is, sitting on the floor, head in hands, taking deep breaths so that _it_ won’t happen again, as it had _years_ ago.

Why do they just watch him?

What is he?


	3. twice as far

_What am I?_

A military base, 52 years later.

He still doesn’t know.

Shadow isn’t sure that he _ever_ knew—he can barely remember beyond a few months ago—but somehow, he doubts it.

The pieces of his memory that he’s managed to collect like pieces of shattered glass, fragments of something intangible, are few but piercing. Sometimes they’re only feelings, sounds, sensations: the absence of everything and the abundance of empty space; echoing gunshots, intelligible words across an echoing hallway; falling, always falling, every time he’s defeated by sleep, he wakes up _falling_.

And, stronger than anything else: a sight. A single sight. A single gruesome sight that appears in his head over and over, churning his stomach as it plays out, even though the details are blurred. There’s someone—a girl—in a room of shifting greys, blotched with red as—

He closes his eyes tight, pushing the image out of his mind, though the nausea is already rising.

There’s a phrase, too: Project Shadow.

Not that it gives him any clues: every search of a military computer has come up empty, as if nothing ever existed. As if he never existed. He knows that’s not right, because he’s here, isn’t he? He knows they’re hiding something about him. They wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop him if they didn’t. They wouldn’t try so hard even with that blue hedgehog by his side. _They’re hiding something worth killing for_.

Shadow grimaces at the implication, and kicks the terminal in frustration.

Another useless computer, another fruitless search.

“No luck, huh?”

Shadow turns toward the voice to find the blue hedgehog waiting for him just outside the door.

He motions for Sonic to follow, eager to leave the base. The place makes him feel unsettled, wrong—which had made it seem like the most likely place to find any answers. Sonic had only confirmed the feeling, unable to stop his incessant, audible train of thought: _Can’t believe any of this place is still standing. Thought you guys blew it up _completely. _Not that I blame you, I kind of hate it, too_.

_Why do you hate it? What do you mean “you guys”?_

And so Sonic had recounted to him, in a tone Shadow might have read as restrained sheepishness if he wasn’t so unsure of vocal tones in general, the story of how Shadow, a conniving scientist, and a bounty hunter had raided Prison Island and detonated the place to cover their tracks, and how only hours before, Sonic had been confined in one of the many cells the island had to offer, and how maybe a day before _that_, Shadow had been locked in stasis.

It had been a lot to absorb, and not just because Sonic tended to present large chunks of information in the form of run-on sentences.

Even now, thinking about it makes Shadow rub his temples with the pressure of an oncoming migraine lingering behind his left eye. He has a lot of migraines recently. They were only headaches, some months ago, and he had attributed it to the change in atmosphere from a life support chamber to the land of the living, but they’ve only grown in intensity since then. He often wonders why he’s been in stasis _twice_, but he isn’t sure he’s ready to hear the answer.

The tidbits and revelations that Sonic lets spill, often accidentally, are confusing enough.

“No, but I don’t know why I expected anything else.” The words come out more as an under-the-breath-mumble than a reply, but Shadow never has to worry that Sonic doesn’t hear it. He always does.

“It seemed like a good place to look.” The response is gentle, reassuring, and it unbalances Shadow slightly. He isn’t sure why, but it seems odd—not a lot, not wrong, but just slightly askew. It isn’t bad. It’s just… odd.

Shadow answers Sonic with a shrug, but his pace slows as he walks, and then, he stops. There’s a creeping static at the back of his head, nothing new, but it’s growing steadily and slowly engulfing him; an unpleasant weightlessness in the head, a faint and high-pitched tone in his ears, a splotchy grey-white obscuring his vision. He lifts his hands to cover his ears, as if it would help, and shuts his eyes tight, pressure building behind both eyes now.

It’s a long, unpleasant moment, but it passes and his senses calm. He opens his eyes and lowers his hands, now aware of a slight weight on his shoulders that hadn’t been present before, and he turns his head to see Sonic holding onto him, looking… concerned?

Shadow bites his lip and turns away.

“You okay, Shad?” Sonic asks, again with such a deep tone of familiarity that it’s unsettling.

“Yes. Fine,” Shadow answers, uncertainly.

A silence lingers between them until, as if just now realizing that it might be _weird_, Sonic pulls his hands back.

For a moment, Shadow misses the weight.


	4. dysphonia

One day, the door opens.

There’s a split second, after the initial sound of groaning metal and sight of brighter light spilling into the room, in which Shadow’s entire body is seized by the emotion he has now come to know as _fear_. Never has the door opened—not while he’s been conscious, at least—and the _unknown_ lurking behind it is enough to push his heart rate into overdrive and make the back of his neck flare with heat.

The split second passes and the feeling diminishes, but just barely: only enough to allow Shadow the mobility to back up against the wall, eyes fixed on the door. It does not, however, diminish enough for him to think rationally about the inherent contradiction that is fear of a person—a human, one of _Them—_being on the other side of the door when it had for so long been the only thing he could even know to want.

One day, he’ll become familiar with the irrationality of fear and all of its contradictions—but for now, in this moment, irrationality and contradiction means nothing to him.

Shadow’s eyes track the door closely, and then the figure on the other side, traveling upward to meet the person’s face. It’s instantly recognizable; a face he’s known longer than all the others, for _as_ long as he can remember, from his earliest memory on. Somehow, it doesn’t make him feel any better.

The man closes the door behind him, slowly, as if he doesn’t want anyone to hear the faint sound of the door’s latch slipping into place. He holds a pad of paper and a pen in one hand. He doesn’t look at Shadow, instead surveying the room like he’s never seen it before. He approaches the bookcase, trails a finger along a few book spines, then walks back in the opposite direction to inspect the large, seemingly powered-off machine. Eventually, he settles at the metal table in the middle of the room; elbows resting on the tabletop, hands bridged over the notebook, chin rested against hands.

Finally, he looks at the tiny hedgehog cowering in the corner.

“Come now, Shadow,” he says, observing the semi-frozen figure on the bed. “There’s no logical reason for you to fear me.” He lifts a single finger from his bridged hands to push his glasses up, and then rests it again. “Or are you flawed, too? Another complete waste of my time and resources?”

Shadow is unable to process the implications of the statement. He isn’t programmed to.

“Come along. Come sit with me.”

Cautiously, Shadow slides off the bed, curling and uncurling his fists, pressing his claws into his palms. Somewhere in the back of his mind a thought nags at him, and he pulls forth an instructional thought: _maintain eye contact while being spoken to, or speaking to another, especially superiors_. He pulls the other chair out from under the table and sits down, but even a momentary glance into the elderly man’s eyes makes Shadow feel small and enclosed, and so he stares down at the steel surface instead.

“Stop pushing your claws into your skin. It’s unsightly.”

Shadow stops.

“Let me see.”

Before Shadow can figure _what_ he wants to see, the man takes Shadow’s hands into his own and turns them over, lifts his fingers, taps against his claws. He mumbles something under his breath, shaking his head as he lowers Shadow’s hands down and writes something on the pad of paper. Shadow catches the words _cold_ and _sharp_, and something about it makes him pull his hands away too quickly, makes him too eager to hide them away beneath the tabletop. He lifts his head up long enough for the man to eye him, fix him with a stare that keeps him from looking away. Shadow shivers.

It’s cold again.

“Have you tried speaking yet?”

The question catches Shadow by surprise; the thought of speaking has occurred to him only once or twice, but in all of his years of conscious awareness, he’s never had the _need_ to. He’s never had a reason to try. Shadow shakes his head slowly.

“Give it a try.”

Shadow swallows down hard, and his claws begin to scratch at his lap as they rest in it. He doesn’t know the first thing about speaking or producing any kind of voluntary sound. He opens his mouth, pushes some air out weakly, and only makes an uncertain, raspy, feeble noise.

The man writes something down on his pad again, then lifts his hand to rub his eyes at the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up as he does so.

Something inside of Shadow sinks into the pit of his stomach. Something at the back of his mind tugs at him. Something runs through his veins, pulling at his muscles. A faint sensation, blurred and pleading, tired and hazy. An image of the fluid-filled chamber from The Room flashes across his mind’s eye and immediately, he’s gripped by the urge to run. He has to escape. Has to get away from the hazy pleading blurry tired fog enveloping him, shortening his breath, sparking hi—

The door shuts loudly and the man is gone.

Shadow sits alone at the table. The panic subsides, leaving him heavy; his limbs are leaden and his head aches as if it’s been compressed between two slabs of stone.

He pulls himself back to his bed and sleeps.

It’s tiring.

The returning blurred moments between dark and consciousness, moving between rooms with no memory of traveling; the evaluations, check ups, exams; the rigging up of wires and tubes when he responds poorly to a task. It wears him out.

Over time, the humans begin to interact with him more, until it isn’t only the elderly man carrying out assessments and giving Shadow weary looks when he fails to perform well. Their interactions, the very thing he’s yearned for all of his waking days, never fit quite right into the emptiness sitting in his chest. He tries harder and harder, practicing failed tasks in his alone time, hoping for something he can’t name—but his accomplishments are met with simple nods, another check off a list of functions he should have been able to perform from the start. They tell him his performance of the task is as expected, but could be better. They say it pleasantly enough, but with a chasm between Them and Him.

And over time, the prefix _Project_ in Project Shadow feels heavier and heavier, crushing the yearnings and fantasies he’d conjured up with his growing knowledge and self-awareness. He still doesn’t know what he is, what he’s meant for—but he knows he’s not like the humans. It has nothing to do with him _not_ being human, but something else he can’t quite place. Something he isn’t allowed to place. Something that separates him, a Project, from Them, researchers and scientists, _humans_.

He can only hope that if he becomes what they want him to be, he won’t be quarantined—physically or otherwise—anymore.

He can only hope.

“Your vocabulary and pronunciation is improving, but the hoarseness and volume is lagging. It hinders your clarity. Work on that.”

Shadow reflexively clears his throat, nodding.

The speech therapist sitting across from him raises her eyebrows, expectantly.

“Y—Yes,” comes the quiet, hoarse reply.

The woman stands up, and as she turns to leave, Shadow’s hand comes up to the base of his throat and presses down, as if it would push the weight up off of his vocal chords, leaving behind only a clear voice that could speak loudly enough to be heard. Even with the innate knowledge of _how_ to, actually learning how to speak has proven difficult—to say the least.

The woman stops at the door and pauses there for a moment. She turns back, just slightly, and looks at Shadow, silent. There’s something in her eyes that he can’t decipher, that he doesn’t know how to name—unsurprising, given how many facial expression tests he’s failed. She shakes her head, turns again, and leaves.

Shadow hates the heavy silence that fills the room every time one of Them leaves.

He sighs, pushes his chair out, and walks to the bed, pulling a book off the shelf on his way. He’s read it already, but not thoroughly enough, not enough times to memorize every term and technique and piece of medical information presented to him. He’s managed it with a few volumes by now, with much more ease than he’s had learning to speak. When he’s satisfied with himself, he pushes the book through the door-in-the-door along with his most recently finished tray of food, and in comes a new one to replace it. The books given to him have mostly moved beyond medical journals and manuals, diversifying his collection with new topics and subjects, but he’s yet to open any of them. He can’t, not until the original set is finished.

And it gives him something to look forward to in the silence.

Propping his pillow up against the wall, Shadow sits back, knees raised, book resting on his legs. He reads through it slowly, covering definitions and diagrams with his hand to test himself. It’s difficult to focus, always—the quiet is just so heavy, so raw that his ears ring, and he misses the constant hum of machines when he was still in The Room—but his only other option is to sit in the piercing quiet and so he pushes forward. The first few pages are the hardest, but after some time, he begins to hum softly to himself and his thoughts don’t jump as often.

It’s as content a reading as he can achieve, but not enough that it isn’t instantly broken by the sound of the door-in-the-door sliding open.

Shadow lifts his head, startled, then confused. This is a break in routine, in schedule, and no one has notified him of any modifications to said routine or schedule.

Nothing comes through the door-in-the-door—not a tray, not a book, not even a voice.

Shadow sets the book down and slides off the bed, cautiously. He briefly wonders if this is a test of some sort, designed to catch him off guard and gauge his response, but he can’t come up with any logical purpose for it. Slowly, he approaches the door—and as he passes the table and becomes unobscured by any object between him and the door, a voice materializes.

“Hello?”

Shadow stops. He’s never heard this voice before.

“Hello?” the voice calls again. It’s nothing like the voices of any of Them and instead very much like his insufficient one: small and quiet. He continues forward, drawn in.

He sits on his knees to be able to see through the opening, and his breath catches in his throat at the blue eyes meeting his.

It’s the small human—the child, the girl—it’s _her_.

The sight of her brings a wave of relief over him. He’s spent so long—months, maybe longer—wondering if the memory of the little girl peering over the window’s edge was fake, something he dreamed once and thought was real, but _here she is_. She’s still small, but less so now. He wonders fleetingly what a person so small is doing in space with all of these researchers and scientists and cold rooms and emptiness.

A smile spreads over the girl’s face, and she whispers: “I _knew_ you were real.”

The words and smile takes Shadow aback, and he doesn’t know what to do other than stare.

“Are you okay? Can you talk?”

Shadow nods, but fails to verbalize.

The smile fades from the girl’s face, but the expression it leaves behind doesn’t make Shadow want to avert his gaze or be smaller than he already is. He isn’t sure what it means, but it’s… soft.

“Your name is Shadow, right?”

He nods again, and this time, manages a string of sounds: “I’m… Project… Shadow.”

The girl’s face scrunches up and she groans. “Ughhh. Everyone keeps telling me you’re a _thing_ and not a _person _by saying projects aren’t people and I knew they were lying to me like always.” For a moment, her eyes fall—but she lifts them up quickly, as if remembering something, and continues: “Anyway, hi, Shadow. I’m Maria.”

Shadow tilts his head, and tries the sounds out under his breath before feeling confident enough to repeat the name audibly. “Ma…ria.” He stops, then quickly adds another new word: “H—Hi.”

The smile returns to Maria’s face as Shadow returns the greeting, and she reaches a hand through the opening, obviously waiting for something. Shadow searches through all his known protocols for a response—what an open, held out hand could mean socially or otherwise—but comes up empty. He opens his mouth to say something, but the words stop at his throat as he catches sight of something further up from her hand, on her forearm: a tube, like the ones he’d spent most of his waking days with, sometimes even in his own arms. An IV tube.

“Yeah, I don’t like handshakes either.” Maria’s voice breaks his thoughts apart as she withdraws her hand. “I think they’re dumb but Grampa alwa—”

The sound of a heavy door grinding open down the hall interrupts her and an expression that Shadow _does_ know seizes her face and body: fear. She turns her head towards the sound quickly, then back to Shadow, and her whisper gets somehow even quieter. “I have to go but I’ll come back. Bye, Shadow.”

And just like that, the door-in-the-door slides shut and she’s gone again.


End file.
